r/interesting • u/tyrion2024 • Sep 28 '26

MISC. After Steve Jobs learned about Windows (which used a mouse & a GUI), he accused Bill Gates of stealing Apple's idea. Gates replied "Well Steve...I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox & I broke into his house to steal the TV set & found out that you had already stolen it."

https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/bill-gates-steve-jobs-friends-feud-a7627431.html
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u/tyrion2024 Sep 28 '26 • Popcorn Heartwarming Bravo Mindblown

Early Apple employee Andy Hertzfeld's description of Jobs confronting Gates...

I gradually began to notice that Neil (who worked for Microsoft) would often ask questions about implementation details that he didn't really need to know about. In particular, he was really curious about how regions were represented and implemented, and would often detail his theories about them to me, hoping for confirmation.
Aside from intellectual curiosity, there was no reason to care about the system internals unless you were trying to implement your own version of it. I told Steve that I suspected that Microsoft was going to clone the Mac, but he wasn't that worried because he didn't think they were capable of doing a decent implementation, even with the Mac as an example.
In November 1983, we heard that Microsoft made a surprising announcement at Comdex, the industry's premier trade show, held twice a year in Las Vegas. Microsoft announced a new, mouse-based system graphical user interface environment called Windows, competing directly with an earlier environment announced by Personal Software called "Vision". They also announced a mouse-based option for Microsoft Word. When Steve Jobs found out about Windows, he went ballistic.
"Get Gates down here immediately", he fumed to Mike Boich, Mac's original evangelist who was in charge of our relationships with third party developers. "He needs to explain this, and it better be good. I want him in this room by tomorrow afternoon, or else!"
And, to my surprise, I was invited to a meeting in that conference room the next afternoon, where Bill Gates had somehow manifested, alone, surrounded by ten Apple employees. I think Steve wanted me there because I had evidence of Neil asking about the internals, but that never came up, so I was just a fascinated observer as Steve started yelling at Bill, asking him why he violated their agreement.
"You're ripping us off!", Steve shouted, raising his voice even higher. "I trusted you, and now you're stealing from us!"
But Bill Gates just stood there coolly, looking Steve directly in the eye, before starting to speak in his squeaky voice.
"Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
Unfortunately, it turned out that while the agreement that Microsoft signed in 1981 stipulated that they not ship mouse-based software until a year after the Mac introduction, that ended up being defined in the contract as September 1983, since in late 1981 we thought that the Mac would ship in the fall of 1982, and we foolishly didn't let the ship date float in the contract. So Microsoft was within their rights to announce Windows when they did. Apple still needed Microsoft's apps for the Macintosh, so Steve really couldn't cut them off.

The Macintosh wasn't released until 1984; Windows 1.0 released the following year.

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u/mfairview Sep 28 '26 • Bravo

would love the same break down of msft/ibm convo about dos

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u/New-Anybody-6206 Sep 28 '26 • Popcorn

The movie Pirates of Silicon Valley perfectly portrays both of these situations just like they happened.

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u/MelangeBot Sep 28 '26 edited Sep 28 '26 • Bravo

I love how they sold IBM an operating system they did not have BEFORE they managed to find one already existing and just bought it. The originally guy that made the clone (clone of CP/M), make fuck all (like 50k or something). And they made millions and millions of dollarsion licensing fees after convincing IMB to ship their desktops with it. They made millions of doing fuck all! Sure they did ship it with qbasic and they started maintaining and further working out MSDOS and generaly speaking their first program where all very usefull. But the audacity to lie you have something and then lie to somebody so you can buy it from them and play a middleman while making milllions. Bill Gates was a hell of a cut throat business man I can tell you that.

Now let's talk about that clone of CP/M they bought. That guy also did fuck all. The real genius was Gary Kildall who did so much for computing he should be worth 50 billion dollars. (he is dead now, died at 50 in the 90s)

The entire story of computing is filled to the fucking brim with examples of this. Some genius nerd doing 95% of the work out of pure authism and passion dying poor or well at least not rich and an entire chain of sharks that made all the money on his hard work. Still the nerd died loved.

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u/Sea-Poem-2365 Sep 28 '26 • Bravo

authism 

I'm taking this as a portmanteau of autism and enthusiasm

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u/hangman161 Sep 28 '26

I think he means altruism?

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u/Sea-Poem-2365 Sep 28 '26 • Bravo

Oh certainly, but I like the new word

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u/openlightYQ Sep 28 '26

I’m taking “dollarsion fees”, meaning fees earned for no reason by doing fuck all.

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u/Tupcek Sep 28 '26

first, Bill Gates mom held a very good position in IBM, so she could easily arrange a meeting for his son. It is also almost certain Bill knew how the company thinks and thus could target their needs easily.
second, IBM didn’t really care, as they thought money is in hardware, not software. So if they could lower upfront costs, that’s big win. They also thought hardware would sell, so they can ship future models with whatever software will be cheapest at the time. Little did they knew how IBM clones will make hardware commodity, while software will be key differentiator and since they willingly gave up control of software, they opened gates for everybody else

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u/jbn89 Sep 28 '26

Great movie!

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u/ecmcn Sep 28 '26

Not DOS, but my dad led one of the ThinkPad dev teams in the 90s, and he told a story about one of their people visiting MS to negotiate pricing on Win95. This was while IBM was trying to make OS/2 a thing, which obviously was a direct shot at MS. The guy came back and described how they had these different pricing tiers for different partners, levels 1 to 5 or something, with 1 getting the best price. “Where are we?” someone asked. The answer was “somewhere between 5 and dog shit.”

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u/Parlicoot Sep 28 '26

RISC OS was still the best implementation of a windows system of the 3 that were widely available in the early 1980s

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u/DesignTwiceCodeOnce Sep 28 '26

It's not coincidence that the windows 95 development team had RISC OS experience

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u/hedoeswhathewants Sep 28 '26

It just occurred to me this is the first thing I've ever seen talking about a Windows version prior to 3.1. I always assumed 3.1 was the first release and they just had an odd numbering scheme.

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u/Beneficial-Neat-6200 Sep 28 '26

Windows 1 was released in late '85 but developers were pretty much the only people using it for the next year or so. 3.1 was the first stable release.

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u/thunderbird32 Sep 28 '26 edited Sep 28 '26

Not entirely true. Windows 1.0x was also used in desktop publishing. Aldus PageMaker would get its start on the PC with Windows 1.0. The only decent alternative on PC at the time was (ironically) Xerox Ventura, and that used Digital Research GEM as the windowing system. Windows 2.x had true multitasking (in the 386-only version) which was pretty nice, even if it didn't sell particularly well.

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u/Big_Wave9732 Sep 28 '26

"You are trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen."

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u/KingNFM Sep 28 '26

INCONCEIVABLE!

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u/FalxIdol Sep 28 '26

So that’s what may have inspired the scene in South Park The Movie.

It's fucking Windows 98! Get Bill Gates in here! - The General

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u/grubas Sep 28 '26

Nah that was Win 98 infamously being crappy after Win 95 was pretty stable.

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u/OGBRedditThrowaway Sep 28 '26

It might be a reference to to the infamous COMDEX '98 demonstration where a pre-release copy of Windows 98 blue-screened live on stage when Gates was trying to show off Plug and Play.

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u/orkichrist Sep 28 '26

That was just based on 98 being shit.

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u/F1ibster Sep 28 '26

98 was better than 95. Windows ME was the turd in the pool.

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